President Donald Trump's ideal authoritarian blueprint has appeared to lose traction while he and other autocrats have started losing their grip on power, former Republican strategist Rick Wilson warned on Monday.
In Wilson's Substack, he described how Trump has long admired autocrats Russian President Vladimir Putin and Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, whose political future has come into question just ahead of the upcoming election in the eastern European country.
Orbán, a longtime antagonist to the European Union, was viewed as a model by Trump and his political operatives. But now, he has started facing opposition in his country in a push by young voters in Hungary, according to The Associated Press.
This signals what could be ahead for Trump and his MAGA coalition, Wilson explained.
"I am not, as you are all quite aware by now, a ray of sunshine, but I take this morning’s essay to remind you that three of the world’s worst, most abusive, most poisonously anti-democratic leaders are dead or dying, both physically and politically," Wilson wrote.
Steve Bannon, Trump's former White House chief strategist, has long viewed Orbán as a key inspiration for Trump's ascension to power and the MAGA movement.
"For years, the Bannonite 'national-conservative' set looked at Viktor Orbán’s Hungary as the North Star," Wilson wrote. "It was their laboratory for illiberal democracy, a place where you could maintain the aesthetic of a republic while gutting its soul. They flocked to Budapest to sip Tokaji and marvel at how easy it was to capture a state by simply rewriting the rules of the game until only one player could ever win."
"America’s techno-authoritarians, political authoritarians, and white nationalist authoritarians (yes, the Venn diagram overlaps meaningfully) loved Orban with the heat usually reserved for melting Grindr servers at CPAC," Wilson wrote. "Well, the laboratory is exploding."
Global autocracy has shown signs of death, Wilson detailed.
"Instead, it’s a cautionary tale: you can’t feed a nation on a diet of pure grievance and absolutely lurid George Soros conspiracy fantasies forever," Wilson wrote. "Eventually, the people realize they can’t eat 'sovereignty,' and the Dear Leader becomes older, fatter, and more obviously greedy, just another corrupt bureaucrat in a good suit."
And it's just a matter of time.
"The Bannonite dream is hitting a wall of Hungarian reality, and the crash is going to be spectacular, but don’t underestimate how many lessons MAGA’s elite leadership class took from Orban," Wilson added.